I knew I had stumbled onto something amazing.

The first person I called when I found out was Kelly LeMay, our Chief Operations Officer, my work wife of 14+ years now.   I shared what I had just learned and told her we should bring all of our clients together and start a new service for them.

We agreed to host a breakfast and a lunch using a trade we had leftover with one of our partners (I was really good at bartering food for work back then) and started inviting clients to come.

What Was This Big Discovery?

This was 2011, and I had uncovered the world of Facebook paid and organic lead generation and was about to pivot from a PR and Branding Agency to a direct response lead generation firm.

As I stood in front of our clients at these planned meals, I showed them what was possible and pitched this new service offering, one after one signed up.  In fact, we had a 100% upgrade in our client services.

It was an easy sell because they saw me as the “expert,” presenting to them something new that could grow their business.

And let’s be real, I wasn’t some guru or certified ads person.

My ads knowledge had come from attending one conference on Word of Mouth Marketing, but that was enough to put me in “expert” status.  Because an expert doesn’t need to know everything.  Just to know enough to be a few steps ahead of those they serve.

It Was Working

Our client base grew, and their results continued to crush the industry norms. Word of mouth spread and I began to be asked to coach individual business owners on how to use Facebook to grow their business.

I loved coaching.

I loved seeing my coaching clients succeed and how it changed their lives.

What I didn’t love was how much time it took me. Each client took an hour of my time each week plus time answering emails and texts. I was working around the clock and was starting to burn out.

It hit me, though, that I was answering the same questions over and over again and giving the same advice.

What if I could find a way to put all of them together in a group and teach them at once?

It was around this same time that I had bought a course from a business mentor I had been following on becoming a paid speaker. With my growing reputation of being a social media lead generation specialist, I was starting to be asked to speak at events, and I wanted to figure out how to navigate it.

But even in buying this course, I was less interested in the content and more interested in how she put together a course to teach many at one time.

I paid $7,500 for this program. (Yes, crazy pants.)

$7,500 was way more than I had in my bank account at any one time.

So, of course, I took a payment plan.

And I took doing this course and breaking down course creation seriously.

Like, nerd on fire, notebook, Post-its, and highlighters in hand seriously.

And after studying not just this course, but every speech or event I could attend or get my hands on, within 30 days, I had launched my first online course.

My Launch

Not really getting the whole one-to-many thing, the course I launched was $5,000 and included 30 days of one-on-one coaching for Facebook Ads.

Even though this was still going to require my time, it was still better than the $100/hr I was getting from one-on-one coaching clients.

Now, at the time, I had a small list of fewer than 1,000 people.

But I launched anyway.

And we were blown away.  Fifteen people bought, generating $75,000.

O.M. Goodness.

And while it was a bit nuts for a month coaching these new folks, only a few wanted to start right away. The rest trickled in overtime.

And It Kept Going

Every few months, we would do this again and drive in new coaching clients, many of whom ended up becoming ongoing agency accounts.

I also quickly added a course-only option that didn’t include any hands-on help for $997, and that started selling quickly as well.

In fact, our first live cast selling that program was my first six-figure launch, generating $113,000 in sales in just four hours.

I knew this was a game-changer.

I could finally serve many while not having to work around the clock.

The growing education component to our business is eventually what led to my decision to sell our agency.  I knew I could coach many more people if we no longer offered one-on-one services.

It was around this time that Josh Turner of LinkedSelling made an offer to buy our company and was the perfect partner to sell to because he was running a similar model for LinkedIn clients. Josh still uses the 30-day Rocket Launch sales model to this day.

The Results Today?

Since selling our agency, we’ve been able to scale our coaching company from $150,000 in sales to multiple seven figures and landing the #475 spot on the Inc. 5000 last year.

I went from being able to work with a max of 30 businesses in our agency to serving more than 11,000 amazing clients and members last year alone.

It’s been an amazing journey, and even though I have been in business through all of Britney Spears’ relapses, it feels like I am just starting.

I am so thankful I decided to scale, serve more, and get paid to do what I love.

The question is now onto you…how can you serve more and get paid to do what you love?